Space Debris
ESA TV Exchanges
Most telescopes on Earth spend their time unveiling the mysteries of the Universe. But some like the European Space Agency Teide observatory on the Canary Islands are used to search, track, identify and catalogue less glorious aspects of space exploration f.i. Space Debris.
The script is online as a PDF file under http://television.esa.int/photos/EbS55340.pdf
A WMV preview clip is online under http://esatv-movies.e-vision.nl/videos/mphi/SPACE_DEBRIS_DV_23-01-08_wmphigh.wmv

Monitoring space debris

10:00:40
Most telescopes on Earth spend their time unveiling the mysteries of the Universe. But
some like the European Space Agency Teide observatory on the Canary Islands are used
to search, track, identify and catalogue less glorious aspects of space exploration.

10:00:58
Clip Jyri Kuusela, Space Debris Office, ESA
« We are here at the Teide observatory and this one is a space debris telescope. We use
it to track high altitude debris in geosynchronous orbit or any orbit which is crossing the
geosynchronous orbit. »

10:01:12
In these distant orbits, some 36,000 kilometres from the ground, not all objects are
operational geostationary satellites.

10:01:21
Clip Jyri Kuusela
""What you see here are the stars. They make trails like that. Anything else, for example
a comet or some other object that will be not circulating earth would make a trail like
that. This particle here is a debris particle and you can see that it hasn't basically moved
at all in our